by Lynne Silver
“That’s right,” Ted said. “I forgot you went to Montgomery Preparatory.” Since Ted rarely forgot any details, Sam could only guess he was playing it coy about his own children applying to Montgomery Prep in the next year. Sam had rightfully claimed he had no sway with the admissions staff at the school, but Ted must not have believed him. It was going to get uncomfortable at work if Ted thought Sam could help get his kids accepted at the exclusive prep school. Sam didn’t earn nearly enough salary to make the kind of donations that gained him traction with the school.
“I went there for high school, but I haven’t been back there since I graduated. I’m sure it’s a very different place, and I don’t know much about the inner workings of private schools,” Sam said.
“Were there other complaints?” Jack asked.
“Three private schools in the last month have logged complaints,” Ted said. “I doubt any of them are connected. My guess in all three cases is that it’s student hackers trying out their skills.” He glanced pointedly at Sam, who felt his cheeks heat.
As part of his admittance to the FBI, he’d had to confess that as a fifteen-year-old, he’d hacked into his school computer just to see if he could do it. He’d changed nothing, stolen nothing, and caused no harm. No one ever knew he was there, but Sam didn’t want anything to trip up his application, so he’d been up front about it. “Fine. That is something I know about.” Everyone at the table laughed, since Sam wasn’t alone in his youthful indiscretion. They were all members of CAT because they were hackers at heart.
“Are you sure they weren’t all related?” Sam asked, thinking swiftly and trying to find patterns.
Ted shrugged and slurped his coffee. “I suspect this case isn’t under our watch. Let someone in the general cyber team handle it. Almost no money was stolen from the schools, so the DOJ won’t take it on.”
“Maybe that wasn’t the goal,” Sam said, thinking rapidly. “Maybe they stole a little bit of money as a MacGuffin.”
His next sentence was drowned out by hoots and laughs at his use of the Hitchcock film term. He accepted the ribbing with a good-natured grin, but he didn’t lose his train of thought. “What if the financial theft was to hide the real goal?”
“What was the end goal, then?” Ted asked curiously.
“I have no idea.” He delved into thoughtful silence, continuing to eat his lunch as the others moved into a discussion about the latest trade for a new pitcher on the Nationals.
He returned to the office after lunch and headed to Ted’s private office. “Can I see the files on the private school hackings?”
“Why bother? We’re overloaded as it is, and these aren’t going to be a big deal. We won’t get a prosecutor to take it on.”
“Maybe not,” Sam replied, “but I want to take a look anyway, with your permission.”
“Fine.” His boss hit a few keys on his computer and sent the files to Sam. “Don’t waste too much time on this. We have bigger cases.”
“Agreed.” Sam returned to his desk and opened the email attachments with the intake files detailing the case. After reading all three files, he saw the cases might or might not be connected. Without knowing more, there was no way to tell, except that his gut instinct was telling him they were connected, and not individual hackings, as was the original thought.
He fired off an email to Ted requesting to take on the case because there was something he was missing. Something bigger than a few grand stolen from scholarship and athletic funding at some prestigious college preparatory schools. With permission to spend more time on the case, he’d find the connection. He knew it.
He wondered how many other schools had been hacked and hadn’t even realized it yet. Likely a lot. While he waited for Ted to give permission for him to delve into the case, he completed some other administrative tasks on his to-do list.
Finally, around three in the afternoon, he got the green light to take the lead on the private school hacks—he had access to assistance from research and they started making calls to various local private schools. From what they’d seen thus far, the schools hit were in urban to highly populated regions. All the schools had big donors and were in the top fifty of the national rankings. Hmm, it sounded familiar. Too familiar; exactly like his alma mater.
With that thought, the phone in his breast pocket felt like a weight because it held the invitation to his ten-year reunion. He’d been lying a little when he’d told Jack and his other colleagues he didn’t want anything to do with Montgomery Prep. The truth was, he’d liked high school most days. Academically it had been challenging. It had been the social life that had caused a few problems.
Sam had had a core group of good friends, most into computers and other academic pursuits like him, but they’d stuck to themselves and not been in the running for prom king or other activities that made you popular. His worst memories about high school revolved around Casey Cooper. She’d remained his friend slash nemesis from orientation through graduation. After their one day of friendship, Casey had entered ninth grade with a clear goal to be the most popular girl, and she’d nailed it with ease.
There’d been no place for Sam in her plan, and she’d dropped him quickly. He’d let her, because tagging after her would’ve been pathetic, though his crush on her never faded. If she’d been stupid or mean, he could’ve lost his fervor, but no, she’d done well academically, and she was never outright mean to him. She simply ignored him as if he weren’t in the grade.
So he’d taken to emailing or writing her little notes and leaving them in her locker. He’d done it once the third week of their freshman year in a lame attempt to gain her back as a friend. He never would’ve repeated the gesture if he hadn’t seen her smile widely when reading the note away from her friends. After that, it became his thing. At least once a week for four years, he wrote her tiny notes, sometimes with jokes, sometimes encouragement, and sometime really bad cartoons.
Somehow, Sam had always assumed that someday he’d summon the balls to do more than write her secret notes. He’d man up and ask her out and she’d fall madly in love with him and they’d live happily ever after. It hadn’t happened. It was never going to happen. Hell, he hadn’t spoken to Casey since their freshman year of college. Still, she was the one woman he held as the ideal woman to marry and start a family with.
He was an idiot. An idiot who had a case to solve, and Casey Cooper could help.
Shit. Sam picked up the phone, both excited and dreading the phone call. He didn’t have to talk to her. He could talk to someone else. After all, Casey worked in development. She had nothing to do with the school’s IT staff or anything remotely connected to the hackings. Still, she was his closest connection to the school, despite his parchment diploma from the place.
He made the call and got a bubbly admin named Annie, who made the assumption he was calling to respond to the ten-year reunion invitation. Her disappointment that he simply wanted to speak to Casey was palpable through the phone.
“I’ll consider attending the reunion,” he finally said, “if work allows.” He tried to make it seem he might be off doing dangerous undercover assignments, when in reality he’d be staring at a glowing computer screen, sitting on his ass most of the day. He loved his job, but sometimes he wished he lived the stereotype that people assumed when they heard he was an FBI special agent, especially given the name of his division. Cyber Action Team implied, well, action, and though they were always busy, always on the go, he’d never had to fire his weapon and likely wouldn’t have to. He did get to wear the cool navy FBI windbreaker when they stormed a building from which they suspected someone was running a cyber fraud ring.
It took an hour for Casey to call him back. Her voice was smooth, professional. Nothing in it hinted that after four years of ignoring him in high school, they’d kissed on graduation night. A kiss, despite its brevity and regrets, that was still the hottest kiss he’d ever had. At least in his memory. It probably hadn’t been that great. It w
as purely the glow of time settling on the memory. It was this kiss that kept Casey in his mind, even ten years after graduation. It kept her as the pinnacle of women and prevented him from getting serious about any of the women he dated.
The second her voice came over the line, Sam was transported back to high school, and his stomach clenched as his sweaty palm gripped the receiver. He heard words coming out of Casey’s mouth and heard his own mouth making responses, which was tricky, considering his brain was in an alternate universe.
“Sam, are you there?” he heard Casey ask.
“Um, yeah. Still here,” he answered.
“So you can do it?”
“Yeah, of course. Wait, do what?”
“Can you come to give a talk on careers in law enforcement on Career Day?” Casey asked, sounding a little impatient. “What’s up with you? I thought you would’ve changed since high school, especially being an FBI agent, but seems like you’re still living with your head in computer code.” It was something Casey had often teased him about.
Ironic, really, since he was always on the ball and on point until she was in his space. Then he couldn’t stop staring at her long almost-red hair and skin that looked softer than silk. As he’d gotten older, he’d also been nervous around her, waiting for her to tease him about leaving letters in her locker, but she’d never done that.
Casey Cooper was the one woman in the world who got his hyper-focused brain to short-circuit. If that wasn’t a reason to stay far away from her, he didn’t know what was. But circumstances and the alphabet had thrown them together time and again. With both of them having the last name Cooper, they always had to sit next to each other at any large school ceremony, including graduation. They were placed in the same required classes such as Intro to World History and, worst of all, PE. Freshman year, PE had been co-ed. What sadist had invented co-ed PE for high schoolers? Someone who liked to watch underdeveloped adolescent boys get their asses wiped up and down a lacrosse field in front of girls, that was who.
Sam forced his mind back to the present day. “Yes, I can come do Career Day. And I’ll be at our reunion,” he blurted, and then remembered to add, “if work allows.”
“Oh, okay, great.” Casey sounded as if she could not care less. “Gotta go.”
“Wait.” Sam remembered why he’d called in the first place. “Any chance Montgomery Prep’s been hacked recently?”
Casey’s tone suddenly sounded a lot less distant and a lot sharper. “Why do you ask? What have you heard?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” Sam said cagily. It was a good tactic to let people think you knew a lot and they’d reveal more than you’d asked. Silence was his friend; an interrogation technique he’d picked up a few years back.
“As far as I know, we’re fine,” Casey said, “but I heard about Wooton.”
“What’d you hear?”
“That they were hacked and the parent body is freaking out that a lot of their personal information was leaked. It’s a total nightmare. Think about how much data a school has on each student and their family.”
There was an awkward moment of silence as they both remembered that back when Sam had been in high school, he’d hacked into the school’s database to see if he could. As he’d told his employer, he’d touched and changed nothing, especially because he’d been careful to only look at his own record. The problem was that the wrong Cooper had come up, and that was how he’d learned Queen Bee Casey’s dirty secret that she’d been a scholarship student, something she’d teased Sam about.
She was the only person ever, besides his boss, who knew what he’d done, and proving that adolescent boys were truly idiots, he’d gone to Casey in a lame attempt to bond with her over both of them being on scholarship.
Unfortunately, his plan had backfired and, instead of it bringing them closer, Casey had been super angry, threatening to report his actions to the head of school. To stop her, Sam had said he’d spread the word that she was on scholarship. For four years, they’d lived with an uneasy truce.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” she asked.
“I do see the irony, yeah,” Sam responded softly. “Casey, I never really apologized for what happened. I was an idiot to look into those records, and once I did, I never should’ve told you what I’d seen.”
She snorted. “Yeah, because you could lose your job if I ever decided to tell the FBI that you once were a hacker, not to mention you would’ve been kicked out of school if I’d told on you.”
“Actually, the FBI knows. I told them during my interview process.”
Casey was silent over the phone, and then she said, “It was your good luck I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it to hide my own scholarship.”
“I would’ve deserved it. I shouldn’t have blackmailed you.”
“Damn straight.”
“I didn’t want to upset you,” he said. “In my own awkward way, I was trying to be sympathetic and tell you there were worse things in the world than being on scholarship. Instead, you thought I was trying to blackmail you.”
“I understand that now,” Casey said, sounding softer and sweeter than Sam had ever heard from her. “I—” But whatever she was about to say, he wouldn’t find out, because she broke off and then finished with, “Why were you asking me about the hackings? The private school community is small but not that small that they’d share their dirty laundry with me.”
“Gotcha,” he said, disappointed that the moment of sweetness was gone. He’d always suspected that whomever could break through Casey’s diamond shell would discover pure powdered sugar underneath, and for too many years he’d tried to be that boy. Now as a man, it seemed he was still trying.
He knew Casey could be sweet because he’d had one day of her sweetness. Well, one day and one kiss before it had been swept away, or more like excised. “You know who to call if Montgomery Prep is hacked.”
She gave a low, sexy chuckle. “Will do, but let’s hope you never hear from me.”
Ouch. “See you at the reunion,” he said, but she’d already hung up, which was a good thing, because he undoubtedly would’ve done something stupid like ask her to be his date to the reunion. Yeah, like she didn’t already have a date, and if she didn’t, she wouldn’t want to go with him.
Sam slowly rested the receiver in the cradle and cursed out loud. Loud enough to get a glance from his across-the-cubicle neighbor.
“Bad case?”
“It’s nothing,” Sam said. It was nothing, and he was pissed as hell that two seconds on the phone with Casey Cooper had reverted him back to the insecure, underdeveloped geek that he was in high school.
It was ten years later, and he’d grown a little past six feet, worked out every day in the gym, resulting in decent muscles, and had a brain muscle that surpassed the external physical ones. According to his last few girlfriends, smart was sexy. So, all in all, he was the total package, and he had to remember that the next time he interacted with Casey Cooper.
In fact, maybe if she saw him in person, she’d see him as he was now and not how he’d been. If he saw her in person, maybe he’d see that she was just a woman, maybe even not as fabulous as his last girlfriend.
Except his last Facebook stalk had revealed that she was prettier now than she’d been in high school. She’d finally allowed herself to eat more than three Tater Tots, and her breasts and ass, which had been spectacular before, were now hovering in the out-of-this-world plane.
The more Sam thought about it, the more he liked the idea of seeing her again. He didn’t want to see Casey for the first time at the reunion. He wanted to see her sooner. He’d wanted to see her a lot during the past ten years, eight years really, if you counted their freshman and sophomore years at college, which Sam didn’t, since Casey and he had barely seen each other except in passing.
Since you couldn’t call someone you hadn’t been friends with out of the blue to ask them to hang out, he’d never contacted her. He had a reason now. A legit rea
son. He needed more information on how the administration of a private school operated and she might help him to see a pattern of how the school crimes were connected. Who better to help him than Casey? He’d show up at the school without an appointment tomorrow. Surprise her and see how she handled getting thrown off her game.
Please turn the page for an excerpt from the first book in Lynne Silver’s sexy Alpha Heroes series
Hot Nights with the Fireman
Available now
Chapter One
Valerie Wainwright stared at the mostly naked man up on the projection screen in her office conference room. Correction. The uber-hot naked man. Correction again. The uber-hot naked firefighter. Normally she never equated the word sexy with firefighter. Her ingrained fear of all things rescue related barred her from relaxing around firemen, but in this instance, there was no denying it. The guy on-screen was Hot with a capital H.
She had to hide her reaction, however. As the only woman in the room, she had to remain professional. It wasn’t as if her sixty-year-old boss or the other two men in the room were ogling his six-pack abs and white daredevil smile that said, “Hey look at me. I’m naughty.”
“Repairing reputations is our specialty,” Peter, her boss, said, and gave her his typical steely-eyed glance, which silently nudged her to speak up and schmooze the prospective client.
Nope, definitely not getting any sexy longing vibes from the boss’s corner. She swallowed and refocused her attention on doing what she did best: reeling in clients and changing their lives for the better when the shit had hit the fan, in most instances because the prospective client had taken aim at the fan themselves.
“Like Peter said…” She swiveled in her chair, forcing her eyes away from the decadence on-screen to focus on the county government official who’d landed in their conference room this afternoon. “When we’re through with your firefighters, the residents of your county are going to be singing their praises and signing their children up to become firefighters.” She pointed at the screen behind her. “The memory of them parading naked with sorority girls in their stations will be a distant one.”